Preparing to release a new EP in Weezer’s “Sznz” series, the band’s leader explained how he keeps himself on track — and how he learned to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language.
The Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo knows how people think about Weezer. The veteran rock band has dedicated much of 2022 to promoting “Sznz,” a four-part series of EPs that ostensibly correspond to the different seasons, but also stand in for eras in the band’s history. “‘Spring’ was the easy-breezy side of Weezer, nobody’s really going to object to that,” he said. “‘Summer’ was more like ’90s alt-rock Weezer, which lots of people will be relieved to hear.”
The trick now was “Autumn,” due Sept. 22, which was still being written when we talked in mid-July. “‘Autumn’ is dance rock, which is not something we’ve traditionally been able to get away with,” he admitted. “It’s really hard to make it both dance and rock and Weezer. It’s very easy for that to turn into something that nobody likes.”
Weezer certainly enjoys multitasking. Earlier this year, the band concluded the Hella Mega Tour, a joint bill with Green Day and Fall Out Boy that wrapped in Europe, where Cuomo said he experienced “the big dream when you were 12 years old lying in bed at night — 50,000 fans in stadiums, feeling the power of rock.” The band released two full-length records in 2021 and planned a Broadway residency for this fall that was ultimately canceled because of production costs and lagging ticket sales. And Cuomo is heavily involved in running his own Discord, a private chat server where Weezer fans are invited to talk with him, weigh in on new music and even act as de facto creative assistants.
At home in Los Angeles during a rare moment of downtime, Cuomo spoke via phone about 10 of his beloved cultural products. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1. “Mr. Rivers’ Neighborhood” The core musical values of my Discord are probably quite similar to the people who were posting on Weezer message boards in 2001, and maybe similar to people who were writing fan letters to [the Weezer superfans] Mykel and Carli in 1996. There’s maybe six or seven thousand people who have joined the server, and often the results of what I’m working on turn out better if I have lots of smart people helping out.
2. Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas The thing I’ve found most fulfilling in my life in the last year or two is that every night, I go on my Discord and I livestream myself playing Beethoven’s sonatas in order. I play anywhere from 45 to 75 minutes, and it’s just so deeply satisfying to me. It’s like going on this tour of the most sublime emotional landscape — from the most tender moments to the most head-banging moments, tragic moments, frightening moments. It doesn’t matter what happened that day or what kind of mood I’m in — by the end of that hour, I’m good.
3. Mouth Taping Sleep has historically been a little challenging for me — I’ll often wake up in the middle of the night, wide-awake, and my body and mind have no interest in going back to sleep. But somebody told me if you tape your mouth shut with athletic tape, you’ll get much deeper sleep. I tried it, and it works great. At night, I say good night to my wife and then keep my mouth shut. The first night I was a little panicky, and gasping for breath through my nostrils, but then my body calmed down and I got a great night’s sleep.
4. TikTok As a consumer, TikTok is obviously amazing; it’s freakishly good at knowing what I’m actually interested in. As a creator, it’s a real game changer because now songs that would otherwise have zero chance of reaching an audience can become gigantic without the help or approval of any gatekeepers. The song “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” was a B-side from “Pinkerton,” and now it’s getting 100,000 streams a day. Another example is “The Good Life” — that’s a song we tried to release as a radio single, but nobody would play it. I just made a TikTok of me doing a stupid dance, and within 24 hours it had a half a million views.
5. Coding The process of building and writing the script that would solve the problem — I realized I enjoy that more than whatever work I was supposed to be doing with the results. It satisfies a very deep part of my brain to work on making the systems around it more efficient, more automated; I’d be happy to spend 10 hours working to make something that would save 10 seconds of mindless labor. For decades, I’ve had boxes of cassettes and Dropbox folders of MP3 of demos, thousands of them. It didn’t seem right to put out vinyl or CDs, or even iTunes or Spotify. Building Weezify seemed like a cool solution to that longstanding problem of what to do.
6. Asana Work Management Platform My life is quite complex now, and I have all these complicated projects like building apps, or building the four-part “Sznz” tetralogy. There’s all these ideas, so it’s great to have them in Asana; it’s like my long-term memory storage. When you move a task from the to-do column to the in-progress column, and click it, this rainbow-colored unicorn flies across the screen. It’s all very rewarding.
7. Audible Semi-famously, we have a song called “The Grapes of Wrath,” which is all about my love for Audible and listening to it in the middle of the night. I’m listening to “The Corrections” now, and I’m not sure why, but there’s moments that strike me as so funny I burst out laughing at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I wake up my wife. It’s definitely a corrective against any sense of romanticization you might have about life before the hyper-internet era — and for me, life back in Connecticut, because I grew up in Connecticut. It’s like, [shocked voice] Oh, yeah! That was super bleak. That’s why I moved to L.A., and that’s why I’m doing what I do, and that’s why we invented the internet.
8. Farm Tourism At the end of the tour, we spent a few days in the Cotswolds, in the English countryside. We would do things like go to a farm and feed the cows, or do some falconry. My daughter’s 15, so she wanted something a little more thrilling. There’s this giant, ancient castle called Warwick, with a dungeon you can go through. It’s one of those horrifying experiences where you have to participate. I had to go up there in front of everyone and go through this torture routine where they humiliate me; they’re not actually touching me, but they make me bend over in front of the whole crowd and basically castrate me. It was just horrifying, but I guess that’s the kind of tourism we’re into these days.
9. Vipassana Meditation In May of next year, it will mark my 20th year of meditating two hours every day. It’s kind of the foundation on which everything else I do is placed. In 2003, I was kind of stuck after our fourth album; I started working with Rick Rubin, and he suggested meditation. When I first started, it was specifically like, “I’m doing this so that I can write better songs.” Now, it’s a little broader — I just want a better life, whatever that means. At the deepest level, it’s strengthening my equanimity so that whatever’s happening outside — good news, bad news — I can stay calm and be happy. And if I’m calm and happy, then I tend to treat other people better, and I tend to make decisions that are better for my own future and the people around me. Less shooting myself in the foot.
10. Foreign Language Banter I’ve taken language classes before, but to do it systematically is new. This is me looking for ways to make touring fun, and it’s also helpful because it improves my stage banter, which is always the part of the show I’m most stressed about. I’m saying pretty basic stuff, but because it’s in their native tongue, it’s automatically amazing. I worked really hard at it, and then I was also able to write a script that accesses a Google spreadsheet. I have 100 common phrases in there, and then each column is a different language — all these different places we went, including Gaelic and Celtic and Basque. The script will look up the translation automatically and auto-populate any empty cell in the spreadsheet, so I can just look through that and know how to say “Are you ready to rock?” in any language.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
